The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence by Alexei Panshin, Cory Panshin Read Free Book Online Page B

With its awakening of life in a creature that almost might be a devil, Frankenstein was the very limit of dareable speculation. The work that followed it was written well within its shadow.
    We should understand that SF at this point had no name and was not a genre. It was not even so much as a story type. It consisted of no more than an argument—the argument for transcendent science-beyond-science. And that argument itself was not taken seriously, so that even Percy Shelley in the original preface to Frankenstein could state on Mary’s behalf, “I shall not be supposed as according the remotest degree of serious faith to such an imagination. . . .”
    Before Mary Shelley, during the Age of Reason of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, there had been no possibility at all of SF literature. This was a time of reaction against the old spirit realm and all its creatures. In a period of “rules, critics, and philosophers” all athirst for rationality, mysterious unknown things were generally not given leave to exist.
    Science itself was not then considered to be mysterious. Rather, it was taken to be the rational process of consideration of phenomena that were known but not yet understood. Science was undertaken by gentlemen amateurs. It had a distinctly practical and material nature. It was only at the end of the Age of Reason, with the isolation of the unknown gas oxygen in 1774, the discovery of the unknown planet Uranus in 1781, the launching of the first balloon in 1783, and similar scientific news, that it became just barely possible to perceive science as mysterious.
    But who was mentally prepared to make this perception?
    During the succeeding Western phase—the Romantic Period of the late Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries—the spirit of SF was able to descend only now and then, when conditions were just right, to light a fire in the brain of some dreaming or drugged-out writer. The stories that resulted were rare and occasional and uncertain. From time to time, one writer or another would pick up the argument for transcendent science-beyond-science for one story or two—at the utmost half-a-dozen in a lifetime’s work—and produce a tale about some weird scientist toying with the forbidden and paying the necessary penalty.
    It is this period that is the source of the cliché of the mad scientist studying knowledge that man was not meant to know. In these stories, transcendent science-beyond-science always looks very much like old-fashioned spirit-based transcendence and is used to evoke horror.
    Notice how isolated all this is. We have an occasional argument for the power of super-science, mainly employed after 1835, and used for its horror and novelty and not for any more serious purpose. It is the rare writer who writes this stuff, and he writes it only now and again. And in these stories that followed the line of Frankenstein, the scientists, like Victor Frankenstein, are lonely figures—like alchemists or wizards in their private towers—operating “science” known only to themselves.
    At the conclusion of Frankenstein, the creature, having killed Victor and delivered his last lament, departs for the North Pole—“the most northern extremity of the globe” 28 —there to immolate himself on a solitary funeral pyre. In the stories that followed Frankenstein, there was a continuing presumption that transcendent science was somehow unnatural and that after it had turned on its discoverer it would dispose of itself conveniently or gutter out.
    No one who wrote of transcendent science had the knowledge or the nerve to push the imagined accomplishments of science beyond the present actual state of science in a mood of calm inquiry, just to see what might be discovered. These Romantic lovers and fearers of transcendence always struck a spark of creative power, and then ran and hid under the bedclothes.
    There was no foundation yet for more than this. The new times of the Nineteenth Century were